Faye, YOU DID IT!!!
The Gosnell movie is fully funded, and it happened at the same time as you made your last minute donation.
Well, people, well done. I’m happy about this. And I will arrange a screening for Ottawa when the time comes.
PS. Remember this moment. When Faye speaks, people listen.
I just made a donation. (Going with ‘better late than never’ Andrea…sorry!)
They have four more days to go and they are at 99% percent of their target amount of 2.1 million dollars. And if you donate, you can choose a perk – like free copies of the DVD itself. Not too shabby. You’d probably buy the DVD anyway!
I have always held that the Conservative Party line on abortion “We will not re-open that debate” was wrong, not because it wasn’t pro-life enough for me (it isn’t) but because it isn’t pro-freedom enough for me.
Had they made their line be something like “we will let freedom of speech reign,” I think it would have been entirely defensible to Canadian pro-choicers.
After all, Members of Parliament must fight for their seats. So in the short-term if there were some “uncomfortable” debate about abortion, but it’s not what constituents wanted, they’ll get voted out. If it is what constituents want, then the MP is doing his/her job and that’s called democracy.
Instead, the Conservatives under Prime Minister Harper made clamping down on any abortion discussion their line. And since clamping down on abortion discussions/debate is standard fare for the most extreme fringe of the abortion rights movement, in a sense, Conservatives were pandering to a demographic that was never in a billion years going to vote for them anyway.
Now the Conservatives can’t rise above what Justin Trudeau said, because they have themselves clamped down on freedom in the past–albeit to a lesser degree.
I suppose freedom is actually dangerous to political parties and leaders. Who knows what people might actually do with it? That’s why citizens have to stand up in defence of freedom regardless of the issue at hand.
Well. That’s enough political prognosticating for one day. (How it is that being pro-life is actually part of a bigger freedom package is a post for another day. In one line: When the state can define and legislate on when life begins and ends, we have no freedom whatsoever.)
So Justin Trudeau said yesterday that pro-life candidates cannot run for the Liberal party. Quote:
“It’s not for any government to legislate what happens – what a woman chooses to do with her body, and that is the bottom line,” the Liberal Leader said. “I have made it clear that future candidates need to be completely understanding that they will be expected to vote pro-choice on any bills.”
And Justin Trudeau said candidates also have to support the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Quote:
“That’s part of the green-light process,” he said. “We check on a number of issues: How do you feel about the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, how do you feel about same-sex marriage, how do you feel about pro-choice, where are you on that?”
Justin Trudeau is a big fan of the values enshrined in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Quote:
“Today marks one of the most important days in our country’s history: the anniversary of the adoption of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
It was more than 30 years ago that we set out to identify and enshrine the values that define our rights and responsibilities as Canadians; the Charter was the result. Three decades later, the principles of democracy, equality and fairness embodied in the Charter continue to reflect the very best of Canada and Canadians.
Embraced by our own citizens and emulated by democracies around the world, the Charter stands as a document that is both profoundly empowering and profoundly Canadian. It is our enduring responsibility as Canadians to ensure that these rights and freedoms are always upheld and preserved, never devalued or diminished.
And what is the VERY FIRST “fundamental freedom” guaranteed by the Charter to each Canadian? Let’s take a look:
2. Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:
(a) freedom of conscience and religion;
Now the Charter protects citizens from unreasonable violations of their Charter rights and freedoms from government interference. So it doesn’t come into play in the relationship between MPs and their political party. But if Justin Trudeau holds the values that the Charter espouses so dear, like freedom of conscience for all Canadians, then how can he possibly require that MPs violate their consciences, or leave them at the door when they walk into the House of Commons?
They won’t tell any woman what to do with her body, but they will tell candidates what they are allowed to think, feel and say about abortion.
Justin Trudeau declares pro-life candidates need not apply for nominations in the Liberal Party.
The question is then: Are Liberal MPs allowed to represent their constituents? There are pro-life ridings. And some of them are were Liberal.
Yes, I had heard about the girl who filmed her own abortion, posted it on YouTube and then discussed it in Cosmo.
No, I didn’t want to comment. But apparently, as per this Gawker article “only men” are weighing in. This is surely because the vast majority of pundits are men, not because women approve of her decision to a) have an abortion and b) post it on the internet.
I’m not really a pundit, but hopefully my words about this count for something.
First off, before I found out she worked at an abortion clinic, I knew she was the most ideological of ideological abortion supporters. AKA, not my target audience. It simply is not normal to be THAT pro-abortion. THAT public.
Secondly, yes, I did go back and forth between swearing and sadness upon reading the story. With women who flippantly end lives in a public manner, that will very likely always be my response. It is awfully hard for a person like me not to get angry–followed up by a good dosage of sad–and then angry again. Then sad. Repeat. Because life is a very special thing, and she is making a total and complete charade of it.
In one brazenly irresponsible action–with the attitude of an impulsive teenager–she is putting her immaturity on display for all the world to see. She thinks she is teaching the world something. Which she is, just not what she thinks.
I’ll leave it at that.
I’m a huge fan of Jackson Doughart. His position on the issue of abortion is well reasoned, and he writes about it with great clarity, civility and genuine intelligence. He also writes as a “non-believer”, that is, he has no religious affiliations and cannot be disregarded as a bible-thumping lunatic, or a “religious fanatic” (refer to my last post).
His National Post article on the New Brunswick situation is just one example of his genius. He exposes the errors of fact made by those who “believe that there are no relevant considerations in the abortion debate beyond the invocations of a woman’s equality and ‘choice’.” In the totally over-blown debate about funding in New Brunswick, he has this to say:
The legal reality, however, could hardly be more favourable to provinces that wish to limit their own culpability for Canada’s mass-abortion culture, which produces over 90,000 terminations of pregnancy annually. The Canada Health Act, which conditions the federal funding of provincial health-care programs upon the performance of medically-necessary procedures, leaves the interpretation of medical necessity to the provinces themselves. So while Ontario and Quebec are free to ascribe necessary status to abortion-on-demand, P.E.I. and New Brunswick are likewise free to place reasonable checks on elective abortions which are, in their view, not medically needed.
And he notes the behaviour of those who advance the cause of unfettered and fully funded abortion with this:
Apart from the profanity of their cause, the one trait that struck me of their movement was its lack of democratic respect. The members of “PRRO” that I dealt with personally in attempting to organize a public debate on the issue—in which they ultimately refused to participate—told me directly that they neither cared nor worried that people like me disagreed genuinely with them. Publicly funded abortion-on-demand, in all places, was their right that no one was going to take away from them, notwithstanding any convincing argument. They were wrong on the facts, then as now, but one worries that this has not deterred them or their many followers from advancing a thoroughly misguided cause.
__________________________
Andrea adds: This really bothers me. Always. “They maintain that abortion is a harmless medical procedure, with restrictions being the sole threat to women’s safety, despite the research indicating that induced abortions, and especially multiple induced abortions on a single woman, pose risks to the health of her future children.” He’s right. How this gets passed of as friendly to women does beat me. But I figure we are currently in the stage of the debate where tobacco companies claim that smoking cigarettes has absolutely nothing to do with cancer. How we all snicker at that silliness today…………… you get what I’m saying.
Ninety percent funded, but remember, if they don’t reach 100% they don’t get anything. Who do you know who has not contributed, who can contribute to the making of this movie about Kermit Gosnell, America’s worst serial killer?
I’m not sure I want to wade too deeply into this debate, but it is rather galling to read an article about the terrorist militant group, Boko Haram (meaning “Western education is a sin”) who recently kidnapped 270 Nigerian girls and see them referred to as “conservative fanatics”. I refer to the horrifying incident that is slowly gaining global recognition, and that is reported in this article here:
“No girl should be a hero for getting an education. But for many girls around the world, walking through the schoolhouse doors isn’t a right or an assumption: it’s a victory over conservative fanatics – some of whom carry guns,” writes Jill Filipovic.
Her article is entitled “The kidnapped Nigerian girls show that religious conservatives hate education“. It’s just the kind of thing a Western, modern, politically correct feminist schooled in our left-leaning universities would say. She goes on to further insinuate world religions with this quote:
On the surface, these kidnappings follow a theme we’ve seen across the globe: religious extremists don’t want to see girls getting the kind of education that will allow them to enter the workforce, because they correctly understand that education sets girls on a path to economic independence and self-reliance.
On April 16, armed men herded the girls out of bed and forced them into trucks in the town of Chibok. The convoy of trucks then disappeared into the dense forest bordering Cameroon.
The fate of these girls is horrific and the perpetrators of this violence are hardly “religious conservatives.” To equate the two is an outrage.
Risking the ire of these Western feminists, I say thank God for Western civilization and Western democracies. Without the civilizing effect of Christendom, whose tenets teach respect and reverence for all human life, and whose advocates have been the founders of our political democracies, our universities (before they were taken over by leftists) and our health care institutions (before the advent of abortion on demand) I dare say that the world would have experienced a lot more of the likes of Boko Haram.